


been without you

by Nakimochiku



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-22
Updated: 2016-03-22
Packaged: 2018-05-28 07:31:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6320176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nakimochiku/pseuds/Nakimochiku
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"My dear Will, all we are is ancient history."</p>
<p>Or, Hannibal and Will are immortal lovers reunited after a rift in their relationship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	been without you

**Author's Note:**

> For tfbl: Not exactly what you asked for but I tried my best.

I

“It's been a while.” Hannibal says lightly, inclining his head, smirking. He looks like crow considering carrion.

Fuck you, Will wants to say. That’s the understatement of the century, Will wants to say. He looks out the window and grunts his agreement. Hannibal is as beautiful as he remembers and just as deadly. “You left the girl in the field for me.”

“A welcome back present.”

“I wasn't the one who left.” Will snaps. He wants to say he was here the whole time. He never left and he didn't fight even when he was hurting, Hannibal could have found him any time but he didn't.

“A homecoming gift then.” Hannibal amends. He doesn't have the decency to look contrite but then, he lost his capacity for decency five hundred years back. “Did you like it? Did you tell them who it was from?”

Will ignores those questions, adjusts his watch and the cuff of his pullover. “You could have told me.” Will grumbles. He doesn't say that he wasn't lonely. He doesn't say that he thought about Hannibal from time to time and missed him like he was missing teeth; unpleasant, vulnerable, conspicuous.

“I didn't think you’d want to hear from me, just yet. I wanted to give you time.” He does have the residual decency to look mellowed, thoughtful, gazing right at Will like he always does. But he doesn't look sorry. Will doesn't know why he expects him to be sorry, when that's never happened once.

“Fifty years wasn't enough? A hundred years wasn't enough?”

“Was it?”

It wasn't.

“Still you could have said something. Wrote a letter. Picked up a phone when they were invented.”

Hannibal near sneers. “You're the last person to lecture me on keeping in touch. Need I remind you of 1492?”

“This has nothing to do with ancient history.” Will looks at Hannibal fiercely for the first time. He needn't remind him of 1492. Will remembers.

“My dear Will.” Hannibal says with his most condescending smile. “All we are is ancient history.”

*

_ It's a surprise to see Hannibal in the office, neatly dressed and aloof. He does not mean to snap at him, to be vicious. But he's pissed. He's understandably pissed. _

_ The fact that Hannibal smiles and taunts him  makes it even worse. _

*

They have catching up to do, but Will doesn't know where to start, doesn't know if he wants to. How does he ask, where were you the past two hundred eighty three years and seven months? Was Europe beautiful without me? Did you enjoy the enlightenment? Don't you think John Locke was an asshole?

Why didn't you come home?

“Why'd you kill Marisa Shore?”

That's not the question that matters, but it's the one he can ask. It’s the question that doesn’t dry his mouth and stick his tongue like so much rubber.

“Why do I kill?” Hannibal replies. He looks unimpressed, can tell Will’s avoiding the issue.

Two hundred eighty three years and seven months ago, Will would have known the answer to Hannibal’s rejoinder, would have the confidence to say Hannibal made gifts of corpses just for him, wrapped neat and pretty, as if he were writing him poetry.  Now Will wants to punch him in the face.

“Depends on your mood really. I would say you did it to piss me off.” It worked, Will doesn't say.

Hannibal shrugs. He folds his hands in his lap, crosses his legs, and waits. There's a drama to the whole affair, each waiting on the other.

Will wants an explanation, and doesn't want to ask. Hannibal wants Will to fall to his knees and plead forgiveness, right here in front of his stylish arm chair, on his stylish carpet.

“I have nothing to be sorry for.” Will says, even though Hannibal hasn't said anything at all.

“Then neither do I.”

*

_ Hannibal looks so damn smug, even without his mouth curled into that devious little self satisfied smile, gazing with appreciation at his own work, a girl hooked on a stag head like a bizarre altar. _

_ This isn't poetry though, this is incendiary, a spark and gasoline, so that Will rounds on Hannibal full of flames. _

_ “Are you going to tell them?” _

_ And just like that he puts the flames out. He doesn't have to ask, but Will won’t give him the extra satisfaction of saying so. _

*

“You can't do this to me.” Will barely has the strength to stand.  He's shaken and ill and the smell of Georgia Madchen’s charred remains is thick in his nose. Hannibal looks up from his soup, and for one sick second Will thinks Hannibal is going to play dumb. Instead, he sets down his spoon, links his fingers and waits for Will to continue. “You can't just take people from me like a child throwing a temper tantrum.” Not again.

“I always found you responded best to my love letters.”

Will wants to say Marisa Shore was a love letter. Casey Boyle was a love letter. Georgia Madchen was just Hannibal being vindictive and petty.

“What do you want, Hannibal?”

Hannibal’s eyes flash. He's always had a million answers to that question, used to accompany them with bites to his thighs and tender kisses. Now it feels like there's only viscera and bone fragments left between them, like pulp from a cannon wound.

“Answer me, for once.” Will demands. He wants to upset the damn bowl of chicken soup, wants to smash things against the sterile hospital floor.

“Get angry, Will.” Hannibal responds, still so light, so laissez faire, they would be talking about the weather. “One of us needs to give.”

“Why do we need to give? Why can't we just get passed this? Why is it always a battle?”

“Because,” Hannibal answers, and stirs his bowl of soup, gesturing at Will to finish his own. “You can’t sign peace treaties before you've fought the war.”

*

**When they met, Will had just watched Hannibal take a sword through the belly, and kill a man with a slash clean and bright as a shooting star. Will watched him pull the sword out with one hand, the only still point in a moving tableau of human suffering and chaos around them both, and toss it casually to the side.**

**He didn't know whether to jump for joy or curse the heavens. He thought he was the only one, already going on eighty and yet not a day over thirty five, some strange creature cursed by the gods to wander the earth until it crumbled to dust for some folly he could not recall.**

**And yet here, another just like him. Immortal, invincible.**

**He reaches him without thinking. Reaches out to him like a sinner to a saint.**

**“It will do you no good to try and kill me.” Hannibal had said, turning and stabbing him in one smooth motion.**

**Will had waited a moment for dramatic effect because once, he'd had a sense of humour. He'd looked up, gripped the back of Hannibal's neck and smiled. “That’s funny. I was just about to say the same thing.”**

**How was Will to know then it does them no good to kill each other, but they can hurt each other just fine?**

  
  


II

Abigail could have been Hannibal’s apology. She could have been the mend to the rift between them. She could have been the daughter they’d both wanted, something beautiful for them, something helpful for her, they could have a family.  But god forbid Hannibal ever let either of them have a good thing for the sake of a good thing, god forbid Hannibal give Will anything so simple, so beautiful, without a touch of cruelty and malice and the intention to hurt him.

How fucking dare he?

How dare he present her like a sacrifice to their strange altar, how dare he encourage his love, and how dare he bring them all so close just to kill her?

Why does he like to give and take away, like some mad, playful deity?

In the dark cell it’s easy to see Hannibal, to see the truth of him, to see his wasted frame and his hunger and his hollow eyes and his monstrous attributes, to see him with antlers and claws. In the dark cell Will can think critically, can pinpoint every flaw, can list every grievance. He could write poetry, scrawl it all on the bone canvas of his skull and scream it.

Hannibal wants to force the issue, Hannibal wants them to go to war. Will bares his teeth at nothing, at the shadow of Hannibal in the corner; hollow and antlered and heavy, and thinks, fine.

Hannibal wants him angry, then he’s angry. He’s furious. He will be blood and vengeance and terror, he will become precisely what Hannibal wants, if it’ll make him so damn happy.

He’ll give Hannibal a taste of his own damn medicine, twist him like god twisted man from clay, and set him to dancing in his palm.

“You don’t get a say any more,” Will tells the shadow of Hannibal. It tilts its head, and seems to laugh at him, as an adult laughs at the futile struggling of a child.

*

_ “I’m alone in that darkness.” _

_ “You’re not alone, Will, I’m standing right beside you.” _

_ It’s been that way for a thousand years, and he’s never feared and hated or wanted anything more. _

*

In nearly three hundred years, he’d forgotten what it’d felt like to love Hannibal. His memories were bittersweet and foggy.  The ache of it was like an old bruise, rather than a fresh wound, so that it didn’t sting the same way, didn’t taste the same, just the echoes of something that once was.

Here, across from Hannibal at the dinner table, baked fish flaking away on his tongue and wine making his head buzz and the promise of a cheesecake in the back of his mind, he forgets. He forgets that his love was ever just a bruise as it tears him open anew.

He hates what he becomes when Hannibal makes his head spin, but he loves Hannibal too much to ever stop.

“What are you thinking about?”

I’m thinking I’ll never escape you, Will doesn’t say. I’m thinking that I don’t want to, because I want it to be this way forever, Will doesn’t say. I’m thinking I love all the poetry of corpses you leave me and I want to write poetry of my own if it would please you, Will doesn’t say. Will says: “I’m thinking of stabbing this dessert spoon into your eye.”

“The fork would be a better choice.” Hannibal suggests, nonplussed, and swirls his wine beneath his nose before taking a sip.

“I don’t want to damage the flesh.” Will replies just as nonchalantly.

“Do you want to keep them?”

“I don’t want to keep them. I just don’t want you to have them.”

Hannibal beams at him. Will looks at his plate, stabs his fish and hastily takes another bite. He doesn’t want to remember what it feels like to love him. He doesn’t want to smile back.

He can’t help that he does.

*

**They traveled. Will didn't know if they were looking for others like themselves, or if they were just bored. The silk road was long, the river Jordan was barren, the sphinx sullen, the streets of every city seemed full to bursting and yet empty.**

**But it didn’t seem to matter because Hannibal pressed against him through sand storms, kissed him and filled him with sand so he was always heavy with wanting him. Even if they were trying to escape themselves, they escaped into each other, into an art piece of corpses, laughing in the faces of the gods.**

**Will used to want a patch of land all his own, a kind, if homely, wife, a few sons to survive infancy and carry on his name and a daughter to dote on. He used to want normal.**

**Will knew the taste of blood, licked it from another man’s palms, and forgot all chances for absolution. Fifty years, seventy five years, one hundred years blurred together. It was the two of them, it was look of panic in a victim's eyes, it was anything but normal.**

**Several continents, a blur of centuries, months apart unbearable, months together worse. Cities filled to bursting with people they couldn’t see because their eyes were filled with each other’s sand.**

**He still wanted a daughter though.**

 

III

If anyone asks, Will is searching for closure. He supposes, given normal circumstances, that would make perfect sense, except that Hannibal leaving him bleeding out on his kitchen floor doesn’t feel like the gaping wound Hannibal left at his gut.

It feels like he was cauterized, and all those feelings, the wants, those memories, are cut away like so much necrotic tissue, closed to him forever. His love for Hannibal has always felt like an open wound, festering and poisonous. He doesn’t know who he is when the wound is stitched closed and disinfected.

He just feels the absence of Hannibal, vulnerable, conspicuous, like gaps in his smile.

So If anyone asks, Will is searching for closure. But that’s not the case. He wants to be ripped back open again, anything to feel Hannibal inside him again.

Hannibal wrote him poetry in Palermo. Hannibal can’t seem to stop writing him poetry, can’t help his love letters and his apologies now that, at last, they’ve battled as he wanted. He writes him manifestos and peace treaties, all in a single corpse.

And Will can’t help but reply, can’t help but fashion some art piece just for him.

Already, his sutures are ripping.

*

_ He makes poetry. He makes a moth of Hannibal’s enemy, sets it alight, so that there is beauty in a corpse. _

_ It is a moth, it is a transformation. It's the thing that emerged from the chrysalis Hannibal whispered to. _

_ It's his apology. _

*

“You weren’t allowed to run.” Will says. Hannibal’s thigh is warm pressed against his, the scratching of his pencil a comfort, a sound as old as Will can remember.

“I was unaware this game had rules.” Hannibal replies, a touch of a smile in his voice, on his face. Will wants to bury himself in Hannibal’s body, and go back, wants everything up till now

“You were perfectly aware this game had rules.” Will snorts. He turns to him, waits until Hannibal looks away from his drawing. He waits for Hannibal to look at him, to study his face, for his eyes to drift to his lips and back up. “You aren’t allowed to run again.”

When Crawford comes for Hannibal, Will wishes he hadn’t said it.

*

_ “Are we no longer on a first name basis?” The glass between them may as well be frozen oceans. There’s something pathetic and wounded about Hannibal standing there. Something that reminds Will and thrums in every heartbeat: I still love you I still love you I still love you. _

_ “I’m more comfortable the less personal we are.” _

*

He gets his family. He gets his kind, and in no way homely wife, and he gets a son. It is not bitter. When Hannibal is gone, he is out of sight and out of mind. His love is a bruise, his love is an ache. His love is just a memory, a happy time long passed to be brought out fondly on holidays and glanced over like photo books, and carefully tucked away until the next stage of pain, until the next reminder.

He gets it all and he gives it up for Hannibal, always for Hannibal, because he can’t help it. He thought it was over and he thought he could move on--

Will wonders who the fuck he thought he was kidding.

They are wet with blood and saltwater, they have broken themselves apart and sewn themselves back together. They wrote a symphony together and it’s still resounding in Will’s ears, so loud, so perfect, so beautiful his eyes water with it.

“You could have stayed with her.” Hannibal’s chest is warm, he rumbles when he talks, a great beast that Will has neither leashed nor tamed yet can’t help but love.

As if you would have let me, Will wants to say. As If I could have let myself, Will wants to say. “Another ten, fifteen years at most.” Will mumbles. It’s better this way, and they both know it. It is better, and it is beautiful between the two of them. It is the only way he dreams of being.

Despite everything, they are the only two perfect beings in all the universe.

*

**_When they parted, Will had walked in on a horror show, on a nightmare with Hannibal in the middle of it. All Will wanted to do was scream, but even when he opened his mouth, nothing came out. Hannibal turned, all violence, all monster._ **

**_“I told you I wasn’t ready for that, for a family, but you just took her in anyway.” There was blood on his face. There was a poem of a corpse behind him, but Will didn’t want to see, didn’t want to read it, couldn’t imagine Hannibal hurting him like this. “You didn’t listen to me.”_ **

**_“So you killed her?” Will couldn’t muster the anger he knows is right there, constricting his throat. “You didn’t want it, you didn’t want her, so you took her from me?”_ **

**_Hannibal didn’t reply, and Will wanted to scream that he couldn’t seem to bear it when Will had one thing for himself, that he wanted to be Will’s whole universe, and he wanted to bestow upon him every happiness only at his own approval._ **

**_He made a choked sound of rage, considered the musket hanging above the fireplace. Hannibal followed his gaze lazily._ **

**_“It’ll do you no good to try and kill me.”_ **

**_Maybe not, But you seem to be doing your damnedest to kill me, Will couldn’t say around the swell of tears. Hannibal proved the soundless accusation right when he walked out the door._ **

**_It seemed to Will that Hannibal would never stop killing him._ **


End file.
